1999-07-30 04:00:00 PDT CALIFORNIA -- In 1979, Cary Stayner's classmates voted him the "most creative" student in the graduating class at Merced High School. Many thought he would go on to be a cartoonist or graphic artist.

Instead, he remained known as the brother of a kidnap victim, Steven, who came home in 1980 after a seven-year ordeal, had a television movie made about his life and died in a motorcycle accident in 1989. Far from living up to any glowing prediction, Cary Stayner bounced from one ordinary job to another, hauling furniture, installing windows, constructing shower doors.

Nothing spoke vividly to those around him of what was to come.

If the 37-year-old handyman did kill three Yosemite sightseers and behead a naturalist, as he says, and if he first thought of killing women when he was 7 years old and peered at supermarket clerks through a window, no one suspected that such evil was building within him.

The FBI didn't even suspect him when it interviewed Stayner, who had been working at the motel where the sightseers disappeared February 15.

"It really affected a lot of us that this monster could be walking around amongst us -- so trusted," said Lisa Hansell, general manager of the company that runs the Cedar Lodge Bar and Restaurant near Yosemite, where Stayner rented a room upstairs.

Inside, it seems, Stayner had been struggling for decades with impulses that he told others he did not understand. One of Stayner's friends recalls Stayner bloodying his fist one day in a rage and telling him he feared he was having a nervous breakdown. Another time, Stayner told a co-worker he had been diagnosed as an obsessive-compulsive, but said it was nothing he couldn't handle by smoking a joint.

Still, even those who tell such stories about Stayner say they cannot connect them with the man who told a television reporter this week that he strangled two women and burned their bodies, butchered two others and wanted a TV "movie of the week" made of his life and crimes.

Born Aug. 12, 1961, Stayner grew up in the San Joaquin Valley farming community of Merced. He was the oldest of the five children of Delbert Stayner, a maintenance man who worked 18-hour shifts six days a week at a cannery at harvest time, and his wife, Kay, a day-care worker who had been brought up by the nuns in a Catholic boarding school and later raised her own children as Mormons.

The couple and their children lived in a small green frame house under an elm tree on Bette Street. It was a neighborhood of older, lower- middle-class homes about a quarter- mile from the railroad tracks.

Cary Stayner attended public schools, swam in the above-ground pool in his backyard, played in the outfield on baseball teams and became the high school paper's cartoonist.

He was, almost everyone said, the nicest guy you would want to meet. He was reserved and shy, rarely visibly ruffled by anything that happened.

There were some things, though, that set him apart -- one in particular. In 1972 when Cary Stayner was 11, his 7-year-old brother, Steven, was snatched by a child molester and kept for seven years.

When Steven Stayner hitchhiked his way to freedom in 1980, reporters and television trucks descended on the Stayners' home. At the time, Cary Stayner was 18 -- just out of high school. Some years later, a movie was made telling the story of Steven's ordeal.

Some friends of the Stayners say they have no doubt that Steven's disappearance and fame touched his brother deeply.

In a 1991 book, "I Know My First Name Is Steven," author Mike Echols quotes Cary Stayner as recounting tearfully those days following the kidnap.

"I remember going out one night after Steve disappeared and wishing on a star that my brother would come back home," Stayner told Echols. "And I did that almost every clear night from then on until Steve finally came back home. I never did tell anybody about it, but I remember wishing on a star that my little brother would come back home."

When Steven came home, Cary told Echols, "I walked several blocks away and then looked up at the stars and started to wish on one again. . . . But then I remembered that Steve was back home, and so I thanked the star instead."

Some of the Stayner family's neighbors saw beyond the stories about looking up at the stars and perceived a boy who was scarred by the kidnap.

"I think it must have really affected Cary," said Michael Kollman, 32, who lived next door for 20 years. "When Steven came home, Cary was kind of put on the back shelf. He was in the background always."

Another longtime neighbor, Victoria Flores-Tatum, said Cary Stayner "was very frustrated at all the publicity Steven was getting. . . . I think Cary wants as much attention as Steven got."

During the years his brother was gone, Cary Stayner attended Hoover Intermediate School -- where he was in a class for gifted students in the seventh-grade -- and Merced High. He doodled, sometimes drawing pictures of skulls. He loved reading comics, listened to heavy metal music and often drew caricatures of people he knew.

He became the cartoonist for the Merced High paper, the Statesman, and drew a comic strip about the life of high school students. One student remembers it was called "Party Hardy."

Many of the students who worked on the paper with him thought he would go on to be an accomplished cartoonist or graphic artist. No Rembrandt, but very skilled.

"He was the oldest cliche in the world -- the proverbial quiet guy. He was always drawing," said Jack Bungart, the Statesman's sports editor, now managing news editor for the Vallejo Times-Herald. "I always thought the next time I saw Cary's name in the paper it would be for a cartoon."

Stayner's journalism teacher, Sharon Wellins, looked back over her old papers the other day and found an exam Stayner had apparently failed to study for. At the bottom of the blank page, Stayner drew a picture of a little man holding a picket sign that read, "Unfair test."

When there were accounts of Stayner acting up, it was usually something minor. When he was 12 or 13 he and a group of neighborhood boys stripped and ran back and forth several times in front of two girls sitting on the back of a flatbed truck near the Stayner home.

"The girls were a couple or three years older than us, and they thought it was hilarious," recalled Matt Cone, one of Stayner's neighborhood friends. "Streaking was really big back then. I bet all they saw was our bare butts."

Much of the time, people recall, Stayner hung out by himself. Other boys started going out with girls, but no one recollects Stayner having a date. Girls would tell some of his friends that they wanted to go out with Stayner, who stood 6-foot-1 with hazel eyes and was the sort of man who women noticed when he entered a room.

"We used to rag him when the girls mentioned they wanted to date him, but he'd never do anything about it," said Mike Marchese, 51, who has been a friend of Stayner's for more than 20 years. "He'd say a woman was nice-looking and he'd go so far as saying it would be nice to get together with her, but nothing ever came of it."

Flores-Tatum remembers encountering a different side of Stayner. When she was 14 and Stayner was 16, she went to a sleepover held by one of his sisters. Flores-Tatum said Stayner crept under her cot as she slept and reached up to touch her breasts. After she told him to go away, she said, he reappeared in the doorway, naked. She said she told him to go away a second time, and this time he did.

In the years after his graduation from high school, Stayner worked a series of jobs in Merced. He hauled furniture and worked for an aluminum company. But he put in most of his years working as a glass installer for different companies -- fixing broken windows, installing new ones and building shower stalls. Sometimes he'd go over to a friend's house and hang out smoking marijuana, watching sitcoms on television.

By 1990, Stayner was living with his uncle, Jesse "Jerry" Stayner. One day his uncle was discovered dead in his home, slain by a shotgun blast. Police investigated but never found the killer. Since Stayner's arrest last weekend, they have reopened the case.

The last glass-cutting job Stayner had was with Merced Glass and Mirror Co., where he worked for Gordon and Toni Ekas for several years. He still had an artistic bent. He once drew a caricature of Gordon Ekas making comments like "umpteenth billion times," a phrase he used often. Another time Stayner volunteered to draw an ad for the company of Old Man Winter blowing, to remind people they needed to get their broken windows fixed.

Marchese recalls that one day a few years ago, he went out in the yard behind Merced Glass and Mirror to find his friend Stayner slamming his fist against a piece of plywood and bleeding from cuts on his hand.

"He said he felt like he was having a nervous breakdown and said he was all nervous and didn't know why," Marchese said. "He said he felt like getting in his truck, driving it into the office and killing the boss and everyone else in there and torching the place.

"I told him he might have a chemical imbalance, and he said, 'I have been told I have, but nothing's ever been done about it.' "

Marchese said he went inside and told Ekas, who then drove Stayner to a Merced psychiatric center where he was counseled. Soon after, Marchese said, Stayner came in, picked up a check and never went back to work there again. Stayner told the Ekases, who found him to be a reliable employee, that he was thinking of moving to Santa Cruz.

Instead, in the summer of 1997, Stayner took a job working as a maintenance man at the Cedar Lodge in the mountain community of El Portal, on Highway 140 leading up to Yosemite.

There he was so highly regarded that the owner, Gerald Fischer, thought nothing of having his own kids work alongside Stayner during the busy summer months. Stayner handled plumbing jobs, arranged pool furniture and attended to countless other tasks needed to serve the motel's hundreds of guests. During his time off, Stayner enjoyed sunbathing nude at several of the spots along the Merced River where the locals liked to hang out.

This year, Stayner was laid off during the slow winter months. He was not working February 15 when Carole Sund, her daughter Julie and their friend Silvina Pelosso disappeared while staying at the lodge. The bodies of Carole Sund and Pelosso were found in their rental car a month later about 50 miles away, and investigators -- alerted by an anonymous letter that Stayner now says he wrote -- found Julie Sund's body near a reservoir overlook.

In the months after the killings, Cedar Lodge employees used to gather in a restaurant booth overlooking oak and pine tree groves along the Merced River. Cary Stayner would sometimes sit with them as they talked about the slayings.

On another occasion, he reportedly told a co-worker that he had been diagnosed as having obsessive- compulsive disorder, but that it was nothing he couldn't handle with the help of marijuana.

"How could we have missed someone we felt was part of our family?" asks Hansell, the Cedar Lodge restaurant general manager. "Everyone living in this community knew and embraced this monster, who was capable of such horrors."

Behind a glass wall at the Sacramento County Jail Tuesday night, Stayner described to television reporter Ted Rowlands his first memory of the fantasy that would later haunt him.

It came when he was 7 years old, he said. Stayner was sitting in his parents' car waiting for them to return from grocery shopping. As he peered through the supermarket window, he said, he began to visualize himself killing the female cashiers.

After that day the dreams came often -- always of Stayner setting traps for women and killing them. Stayner said that for 30 years he kept his fantasies secret. "To my family it would be a big shock," he told Rowlands.

But on the night of February 15, he said, he could no longer control his bottled-up impulses. That night, he said, he sneaked into the tourists' room at the Cedar Lodge, held them at gunpoint, gagged and tied them up. Stayner told Rowlands that he brought a knife and camera with him but never took pictures of the women.

Stayner said the women obeyed his every command. He said he quickly strangled Carole Sund and Pelosso, but took Julie Sund on a 30- mile drive to Lake Don Pedro and cut her throat.

Stayner swears he never sexually assaulted or tortured the women. He said he wanted the killings to be as painless and humane as possible, according to Rowlands.

After the killings, Stayner said he kept close tabs on news of the FBI's investigation. "He said he was dumbfounded that the FBI had focused on (a group of Central Valley parolees)," Rowlands said.

When investigators did not come back to arrest him, Stayner said he knew he could no longer curb his impulse to murder again. "I would have kept killing until I was caught or killed," he told Rowlands.

Stayner said on July 21 he drove to Foresta Road in Yosemite National Park, a favorite spot where he said he once saw Bigfoot. The mythical beast apparently fascinated him. It was even on his mind when he caught a taxi ride home the night he says he dumped the bodies of Pelosso and Carole Sund.

"He said he had actually seen one," cab driver Jenny Horvath said. "He wanted to show me where he saw Bigfoot." She declined.

On July 21, Stayner told Rowlands, he brought up Bigfoot in conversation with another woman -- Joie Armstrong, a 26-year-old naturalist.

Stayner said he chanced upon Armstrong in front of her cabin. When he realized that she was alone, he said, he could not control the urge to kill her too. Her beheaded body was found near her cabin July 22.

As Stayner spoke, Rowlands remembered, he "seemed to feel very proud of himself for going 30 years without doing this."

CARY STAYNER'S UNREMARKABLE LIFE

Tragedy seemed to stalk Cary Stayner - his brother's kidnapping and his uncle's murder. Now authorities beleive he killed four women in or near Yosemite.

STAYNER BORN: On August 12, 1961, Cary Anthony Stayner is born, the oldest son of Delbert Stayner, a cannery worker, and his wife, Kay.

BROTHER KIDNAPPED: While walking home from school in 1972, Stayner's younger brother Steven is kidnapped by Kenneth Parnell, a pedophile with previous convictions for sex crimes.

HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION: In 1979, Cary Stayner graduates from Merced High School, a talented cartoonist for the school paper.

BROTHER RETURNS: After seven years of captivity in a series of small Northern California communities, Steven Stayner escapes from Parnell and rejoins his family in 1980.

ODD JOBS: Following his graduation from high school, Cary Stayner works a succession of menial jobs, including at a furniture store, pest control company and a window shop.

MOVIE AIRS: "I Know My First Name Is Steven," a film about Steven Stayner's ordeal, is televised in 1989.

MOTORCYCLE ACCIDENT: That same year, Steven Stayner dies while riding his motorcycle.

UNCLE'S SLAYING: In 1990, Jesse "Jerry" Stayner, the brothers' uncle, is shot to death in the home he and Cary shared.

BREAKDOWN: In 1995, while working at Merced Glass and Mirror, Cary Stayner tells a co-worker that he thinks he is having a mental breakdown and is taken to the Merced County Mental Health Department, where he is treated and released.

DRUG BUST: Two years later, police raid a friend's house in Atwater and find marijuana plants, but Stayner is released and no charges are filed. Police say he was simply in the "wrong place at the wrong time."

EL PORTAL: Stayner moves to the mountains that same year, and takes a job as a maintenance man at the Cedar Lodge.

GRIM CONFESSION: Earlier this month, Stayner confesses to slaying three Yosemite tourists and a naturalist.